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The bare stub template can be added as a temporary solution for someone without the time/inclination to look for a more specific one - ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stubs is then regularly cleared by stub sorters. In some ways, this keeps them in one place and so might be preferable to adding say other top-level stubs like {{bio-stub}}or{{geo-stub}} where they might sit unnoticed for much longer. However, when tools cause the adding of bare stubs to a lot of articles, it creates quite an annoying backlog.
The numbers seems to be under control at the moment, and with the way Page Curation works it's probably the easiest solution to be automated. But just like 'uncategorised' which the Toolbar also uses, it would be preferable to find the right category if possible. One thing it definitely shouldn't do is add {{stub}} to articles which already have a different a stub tag. --Qetuth (talk) 00:15, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
Deprecating old stub types
I stumbled across some old-format stub types as redirects (namely {{foo-footybio-stub}} redirecting to {{foo-footy-bio-stub}}). Sixteen such template redirects had at least 10 transclusions so I will add them to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects, but around 10 only had single-figure transclusions and 10 had no transclusions at all. I am wondering what people think about deprecating and deleting these templates - is it acceptable to replace the last few transclusions (and perhaps make no "meaningful" edit to the articles when doing so) and where would be the best place to consider deletion - Wikipedia:Redirects for discussionorWikipedia:Categories for discussion? Or maybe the template redirects can even be speedy deleted under G10? SeveroTC09:48, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
Stub templates are not encyclopaedic content. They are an administrative utility, there to help us organise, maintain and build encyclopaedic content. Strong consensus here should be sufficient grounds to delete unused stub templates with no substantive history. - TB (talk) 11:11, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
Changing flags to images on country geo-stub templates
Hi everyone. I've just noticed that 85.64.251.156 (talk) has been changing the images in country geo-stub templates over the last couple of days. Usually this is a change from the country flag to the country flag with the country map in the background. Here's a typical change. Do people think these changes are a good idea? (I know that this change at least will be controversial - I was involved in an RfC about the flag of Western Sahara a while back over whether the page should redirect to the SADR flag or not.) Let me know what you think. — Mr. Stradivarius(have a chat)09:34, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
I have been thinking for a while that the Stub List isn't actually much use (to me) for finding a stub - this is often easier to achieve by looking through the stub category tree or using search. Nor is is organised well enough nor up to date enough to really function as an 'official' list. I think having these stub template categories for major projects (eg, countries with >100 templates, broad parent projects like literature and science) could become a useful alternative for helping editors find a stub template to apply, and might be easier to maintain, link to, etc. --Qetuth (talk) 00:25, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
It's not finding correct counts. AFAIK, there's not a lot of us stub sorters, so I have difficulty believing the following changes occurred in a little over a day.
Yeah, probably related to general database crappiness lately. That report itself is much, much too large, though. I'm surprised it's been able to update monthly given its size. If you can come up with a sensible way to split the report into sane chunks, I can try to debug and correct some of the issues you're seeing. As it is, I'm simply unable to load such a large page to do any real testing/investigating. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:14, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
I assume that by size would be a useless split as it would still have to check the sizes of all then throw the rest out? The most important parts of the regular report I think are the <60 and >800, which would drop the final size considerably, if is doable. By tree is no good as cats appear in multiple trees, and we don't want it to not list cats not in the stub tree. What about alphabetically, splitting the alphabet into appropriately sized chunks and run the chunks separately? The report would still not be as much use without combining the results, but would that help reduce running stress and/or debugging? Or as a first step before then splitting by size or by tree? --Qetuth (talk) 04:21, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
I think there may be some confusion. The issue isn't (as far as I know) the volume of data in total, it's the report's size itself. That is, there's no issue checking every stub category and throwing out (truncating) some of the results. The current issue is that the report itself is simply too large (with too many sortable HTML tables) to load/render easily in a Web browser.
It sounds as though you're saying that if the report only included categories that contain <60 or >800 stubs, that would be of more utility. Adding these limitations would dramatically reduce the size of the report. Would adding these limitations be acceptable? Is there any value to having the full report as the bot currently posts (listing every stub category) on a wiki page? --MZMcBride (talk) 18:12, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
<60 or >800 are the most interesting bits in this report. Lots of categories are in the sweet area but it is those that are too big or too small that we need to keep an eye on. Severo (talk) 19:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Oops. Then yes, if the data gathering is no problem, then splitting by size and having the 60-200, 200-400, 400-600 and 600-800 tables either on their own subpages or chucked out, would be okay. That restricts the main page to less than 2000 of the over 11000 categories. --Qetuth (talk) 23:30, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
E.g. {{Hyogo-geo-stub}} is missing {{Japan-geo-stub}} in its hierarchy and jumps straight to {{Geo-stub}} which is the top layer. This seems to be throughout the geo stubs. This makes sorting difficult as the something that expands beyond Hyogo's borders, should go in Japan-geo-stub, not Geo-stub. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 01:09, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
If you mean the stub hierarchy on the template documentation page, it is automatically generated from the templates name, and so would need the template to be named {{Hyogo-Japan-Asia-geo-stub}} which is silly. It is useless for some stubs and misleading for others. I assume this system was created when the stub tree was far smaller and simpler? I think that whole page could do with a revision, to be shorter and simpler. --Qetuth (talk) 02:57, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
Decommission Discoveries
Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Discoveries has not been used since August 2012, and most of the discussions stretching back another year had little or no discussion, often only when comments were asked for elsewhere (such as on this talk page). I think it's time to officially deprecate it and direct discovery discussions to Proposals or CfD as appropriate to the case. --Qetuth (talk) 03:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I think you are right in terms of the current situation. Vranje was separate district ('Vranjski okrug') in past, during Kingdom of Serbia if I am not wrong. Taking that in consideration I think that this template should be probably renamed to City of Vranje geography stubs or something like that.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 09:55, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
box office
It is a failure movie, the movie become eraculate comedy because of the action in dailauge motion, the producor and the director this movie has stop acting in new movie after this film — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.217.89.42 (talk) 14:41, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
stub templates or categories
Which comes first? I've seen it done both ways and would like to know if a standard format has been decided. Sasata (talk) 18:57, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I seem to have phrased my question quite ambiguously ... I meant to ask about the order of the template and categories at the end of an article, which is listed first? e.g.
{{Agaricales-stub}}
[[Category:Agaricus]]
or
[[Category:Agaricus]]
{{Agaricales-stub}}
It's not exactly a critical issue, I know, but I create a lot of stubs and would like to know if there's a preferred way of doing things. Sasata (talk) 19:48, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't know how many active participants WP:WSS has, but if anybody watches this talk page, just wanted to note that Category: Stubs had grown to over 700 entries in recent weeks. Anyone who stub-sorts regularly might want to check in from time to time to keep it manageable. Thanks. Woodshed (talk) 10:10, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
I'm sure I'm not the only one trying to chip away everyday but yesterday it was down to 0 and today it's back up over 90. It's an ongoing battle. - Dravecky (talk) 23:18, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
Please help defend the stub sorting project
Wanted: Editors passionate about defending the standard practices of the stub sorting community.
I've been trying to clear some of the micro stub categories and found myself bombarded by several who feel that the stub sorting general practices should not apply to the stub sorting project. As yet, I seem to be the only voice arguing in favor of the stub sorting project. Please come voice your opinions.
I can't get passionate about that issue, sorry. But I don't know whether the stub-sorting community actually exists. There's a growing backlog at Category:Stubs (200+ for a few days), and after the total lack of support I got in the discussion I mentioned above (background here), I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for stub-sorting. Maybe there's just not any point in sorting stubs. PamD15:14, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
HiUser:PamD, nice to see you are still invloved. I was reading the Signpost article about this project just recently, and it struck me that there is something I have never seen discussed:
Are there other wikiprojects that take over stub-sorted categories and work on putting flesh on stub articles? Does Wikipedia keep statistics in this area? XOttawahitech (talk) 14:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
I have always hoped/assumed that somewhere out there someone is saying "I'll work on Peruvian footballer stubs" or whatever: that has to be the reason stub-sorting is done. But No, I have no evidence that anyone uses them at all! PamD15:12, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the speedy response, User:PamD - I wonder why project members assume that there are wikipedians working on their own without the direction of a wikiproject. If there is a WikiProject to build&sort stubs, why isn't there a corresponding one to eliminate stubs? Just curious. XOttawahitech (talk) 02:09, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
Stubs not flowing to new category after change to template
Recently, when I move a template to a new category, the articles tagged with that template still sit in the old category. Has anyone uncovered any nice ways to tell Wikipedia that it needs to recategorize / resave all the articles connected to a particular template?
Dawynn (talk) 11:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that a recent change to the job queue software has broken this, but the only way I know to fix the transcluding pages is to WP:NULLEDIT them, and at WP:VPT they're saying not to do that. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:59, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
User:Lugnuts has created several stub tags, in order to better sort ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Canadian film stubs. While I agree that these tags were needed, instead of simply updating the tags for articles in that category, he has been adding them to stub articles for Canadian documentaries and television films, which are already tagged as being from Canada. I am looking for a consensus on whether it is necessary to add a second (and in some cases a third) stub tag, just to show what decade a film was made, when the article already has a stub tag in the same category that is more specific. Or, is it simply redundant, when an article is already tagged as a Canadian film and/or already tagged as a film from a specific decade, and the additional tag just adds the article to multiple sub-categories of ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Canadian film stubs?Fortdj33 (talk) 14:05, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
Define "more specific". Films are sorted a few different ways. 1) Country of origin. 2) Genre. 3) Decade. In some cases, as you're finding, some stub tags cover two of these sorting methods. Only in rare cases (notably in US), do we find stub tags that cover all three. I don't see how a stub tag that covers sort methods 1 and 2 but neglects 3 is any more specific than a stub tag that covers sort methods 1 and 3 but neglects 2. The problem with having three different sorting methods is that, even if all film stub articles get tagged, films will often be tagged in a way that may cover one or two of the sorting methods, while neglecting the other method(s). Dawynn (talk) 11:50, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
Well, the reason that I consider country of origin and genre to be more specific, is because both of those criteria have wikiprojects dedicated to them, while decades do not. It's my understanding that the only reason to break a stub category down by decade, is because the category is so large that it needs to be sorted into sub-categories. So in this case, if an article already has a stub tag marking it as Canadian, and a stub tag marking it as a documentary, I think that adding a third tag to sort by decade serves no purpose and is simply unnecessary. Fortdj33 (talk) 13:41, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
Alamukii is a traditional name that comes from the so called Yoruba entity in the 16th century.This names is invented by the great great grand father of the Alamukii family who believe in their faith of their only creator (God). Alamukii is just a name but it was associated with the believe and faith in the creator. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alamukii (talk • contribs) 22:10, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
Any thoughts on the best stub type for Ambassadors, High Commissions, etc - there are a batch of them in Category:Stubs at the moment and no stub types for international relation, diplomacy, etc. Some could be "{{London-struct-stub}}" etc, or {{job-stub}} for the Ambassadors but that doesn't seem ideal. PamD16:06, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
New maths stubs - I'd like to create and then add lots of content...
Hi all! :D
I would like to start, and then seriously expand on stubs for a few different mathematical functions, such as the Inverse Tangent Integral - which currently redirects to the Polylogarithm. The latter is seriously cluttered, and contains next to nothing about the Inverse Tangent Integral.
This function really needs it's own page, and if given one, I'm more than capable of fleshing it out quite a bit.
Can someone pleasew explain to me why the stub tags for Georgia (U.S. state) are all "GeorgiaUS-", not "Georgia-US-"? Since a GeorgiaUS-foo-stub is a type of US-foo-stub, it seems to me that "Georgia-US-" should be the correct form. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu19:10, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
This is beyond the scope of this WikiProject, which is WikiProject stub sorting. If you think so, feel free to remove the stub tags. Then, if what's left in the category is below 50, feel free to nominate it for upmerging. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu04:16, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
Invitation to User Study
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I have proposed that stub categories be changed to hidden categories, in line with other non-topic-specific/project categories. Please contribute to the discussion at Category talk:Stubs. Thanks. SFB21:30, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
As Redrose64 mentioned, I re-created the stub tag, which still directs to the parent category, and nominated the sub-category for deletion. However, the creator of both modified them, so that the stub now populates the category. Not sure that there are enough articles to warrant a separate category, but I agree that it's now a WP:CFD matter, since the creator didn't appear to propose why the category was needed. Fortdj33 (talk) 17:37, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
I've just seen this cat/stub at CfD, and I'm puzzled as to why this process of proposals still exists. Anything created in error (either not-needed, or named incorrectly) can be dealt with at CfD. Can someone shed some light on this? Thanks. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead18:55, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
I believe that it still exists to try and keep things tidy, so that established naming conventions are applied and diffusion is not carried out to too fine a level. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:53, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks RR. It's kind of a paradox. Experienced editors aren't going to wait 5 days to be told by someone they can create a stub/category, as they know how it works and new editors simply wont know the process exists. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead08:08, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
When I was a new editor and first came across a stub category, I found the {{WPSS-cat}} template quite helpful. Just by seeing that, I knew there was a procedure to follow for this type of thing. --StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me18:37, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to be completely consistent, but for the most part it appears that any country with a separate category for film directors, usually has it as a sub-category of "Fooian film biography stubs" (which itself is usually a sub-category of "Fooian people stubs"). If the film biography category doesn't exist, then the director category is usually a sub-category of "Fooian artist stubs". And if the artist category doesn't exist either, then the director category is simply a sub-category of "Fooian people stubs". I agree that some criteria should be agreed upon, to make things more consistent. Fortdj33 (talk) 01:35, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
US county stub tag names
I have found that the stub tagfs related to US counties are inconsistant. Just to take California as an example, we have {{AlamedaCountyCA-geo-stub}} (with the word "County" in it), {{OrangeCA-school-stub}} (without the word "County", but still with the CA), and {{Riverside-school-stub}} (not even a CA - ambiguous, for example, with Riverside, Iowa). I think we should go for a consistant set of names for all US county-related stubs - definitely with the state abbreviation, and probably with the word "County" (since many county names are also names of cities within these counties, such as the 3 mentioned above). And in cases which are ambiguous with locations outside the counties, we should probably update all references and delete the redirect. Anyone else have an opinion here? (Note that I'm excluding cities which are identical with their counties, such as San Francisco, as well as the boroughs of New York City.) עוד מישהוOd Mishehu13:20, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
Good catch. I agree. I like the idea of the first example; while it can get lengthy (such as "NorthumberlandCountyPA-geo-stub", perhaps?), that method leaves the least amount of room for ambiguity. Or, we could abbrevitate "County" as "Co" (NorthumberlandCoPA-geo-stub). –TCMemoire22:27, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
I think that "County" is clearer, especially since we're using CamelCase. I think that "NorthumberlandCountyPA-geo-stub" is clearer than {{eventoedungulate-stub}}, which has 3 words grouped together with no indication where one ends and the next begins.
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Leaflet For Stub Sorting At Wikimania 2014
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We are offering to design and print physical paper leaflets to be distributed at Wikimania 2014 for all projects that apply.
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Project leaflets Adikhajuria (talk) 15:16, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
Most visited stub articles on wp:en
Would this be helpful? I ran a report to collect most visited stubs on English Wikipedia in March 2014. Using seed category: Stub_message_boxes here are the results. Erik Zachte (talk) 10:49, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
I certainly see how this could be useful. While, of course, it is important to expand all stubs, this lets us know which stubs we should tackle first. Thanks Erik! –TCMemoire19:25, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
Stub-sorters might like to have a look at this category. There are 967 pages at the moment. I keep an eye on one letter of the alphabet (P) and sort the bio-stubs there: other stub-sorters might like to adopt another letter so we can keep it sorted. "People stubs" is a pretty useless category, so they all need to be refined into narrower stubs - by nationality if nothing else, but there's usually something better. PamD08:54, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
Stub type renames and deletions are now (since we depricated SFD) handled largely by non-WSS people; it's unreasonable to expec tthem to dig through these pages to handle the renames.
Honestly -- its a pain to try to bring these up-to-date. And, as you point out, I've often been confused as to exactly where to place categories when they fall under multiple parents. If anyone finds the lists helpful, we can try to keep maintain. But I feel they've become more pain than they're worth. Dawynn (talk) 11:13, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I'm starting this discussion as a tangent to another discussion on the number of stub templates per page. I'm having it on this WikiProject talk page rather than there because I think the conversation is more appropriate here.
If the purpose of stub sorting is to allow specialized editors to find interesting articles to work on, are we really making it easier for them to find the articles if they have to navigate over 10,000 different categories? I think we need to consider reducing the number of categories and stub types overall. The categories will be bigger but they will be easier to find. Harej (talk) 03:30, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
On the other hand, someone who wants to find stubs about American journalists who were active during World War II would generally be focused on those born between the late 1870s and the early 1920s; others may prefer to focus on those active now - generally those born since around the mid 1950s. By categorizing them by when they were born, you make it easier for these users. And I can find you all the stubs on American journalists (at least those tagged as such) on a single page - this one; there are currently 1784 of them. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu11:32, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
This list looks like it's completely arbitrary which uses which form. We should either have them all renamed to the same form, of decide on a clear rule which shouls have which name, and rename them all to match. (A full list can be found at User:Od Mishehu/Saint.) עוד מישהוOd Mishehu06:49, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I agree - there shouldn't be a period/full stop in the template names (nor, IMO, in the articles themselves, since the word saint ends in a t - but it seems to be a UK vs US thing). Grutness...wha?23:57, 25 June 2014 (UTC)
It's a problem I've had with articles too - and in the real world (I live in Saint Clair, which is apparently officially St Clair - or not, depending on your source). A few general points though:
"Saint" seems to be the standard for country, territory, and island names (Barthélemy, Helena, KittsNevis, Vincent&G, Martin, Pierre&M all seem to use that in their articles, as do the three USVI islands).
The US standard for cities and counties seems to be St.
That only leaves a French one, a Russian one, and a Swiss one to worry about at the moment - all of which should simply follow the article names.
As to the intent of {{Wikipedia-stub}}, it's clear to me that it's for articles about Wikipedia itself, not articles hosted on Wikipedia. It appears that some people - including the CFD participants - believed it to be a general-purpose stub template like {{stub}}, so I've cleared up this lot (the usage of {{Wikipedia-stub}} will need checking again every few months}. That belief is echoed by the CFD nominator's rationale: 'Since all stub categories are Wikipedia administritive categories, and many of the administritive categories have "Wikipedia" in front of their names, this category looks like it means "Articles in this category are stubs on Wikipedia".' The fact that it had no subcategories, and therefore does not encompass "all stub categories", seems to have escaped notice. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:42, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I think the rationale stands, regardless of my involvement in stub sorting. Categories (whatever their purpose) really need to relate their meaning in a simple and unambiguous manner. "Stubs about Wikipedia" does a much better job of this than "Wikipedia stubs". As a general rule, people shouldn't have to consult the category page to understand its meaning. I do not see the divergence from naming convention as an issue – conventions are there to promote good practice, but where a convention's application is to the detriment of their purpose (i.e. making things clear for users) then we should diverge from it. Hopefully, this change will almost certainly remove the need for clean-up work at "Wikipedia stubs" caused by good-intentioned editors confronted with an ambiguous title. SFB09:24, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
That is not the scope of either the first or the second proposal. By my argument, ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Commerce stubs stays at ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Commerce stubs because no one could possibly confuse it with anything else. The stub nomenclature works fine but starting a category with "Wikipedia" is a special case given that we use it as an administrative prefix (e.g. Category:Wikipedia tools). Hence, on its own, there is the confusion over whether "Wikipedia stubs" would regard (a) stubs about wikipedia, or (b) be the top administrative category for stub articles on Wikipedia. The logic is not that "stubs about X" is superior to "x stubs" generally. SFB13:33, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
Why not adopt a letter of the alphabet? There are no unsorted People stubs filing under "P": that's my little patch. (I also sometimes trawl through the ones who have bracketed disambiguation, stub-sorting them while checking that they're linked from the base name via a hatnote or dab page entry.) PamD15:54, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure what triggers the rebuild of this page, but it hasn't updated since June. Can someone investigate and revive the automatic monthly build of this page? Dawynn (talk) 11:31, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
I have just filed a bot request for a new task for MoohanBOT. MoohanBOT currently performs minor stub sorting tasks, retagging biography articles from {{stub}}to{{bio-stub}}. The new functionality I have proposed will enable the bot to sort articles relating to British, English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish people into more specific categories. If the bot is accepted and works as planned there is scope to expand this method to other geographic regions. Your input would be appreciated on the request page! Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 11:38, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
Petersburg Census Area replaced with Petersburg Borough
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
Disambiguation pages are (mostly) in article space, but {{Lapland-geo-stub}} is a template: very few templates are set up with the intent of offering dab choices. One example is {{sandbox}}, but I really don't think that we should set up stub templates like that. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:07, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
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I'd vaguely assumed that there was a hyperactive stub-sorter working in a different time zone from me, sorting them all immediately they appeared in the category. Does seem a bit unlikely now you mention it. PamD15:56, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Iwould investigate this - weird bugs in templates are something of a specialism of mine. Unfortunately, {{asbox}} was recently converted to Lua (see Module talk:Asbox), and its code is now impenetrable. I do not see anything above where the proposal to Lua-ise the template was mentioned, let alone discussed. We could revert the template to its pre-Lua version. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:17, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I went to Module:Asbox, and knowing that the category with the problem was ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stubs, and that it must be treated differently from other categories, I did a search for the word "stubs". I found it twice - once is in a comment, the other is in this construct:
table.insert(stubCats.v, v == '' and not p.demo and pageDoc.exists and
'Stub message templates with documentation subpages'
or not cat:match' stubs$' and {k = 'S', t = page.text}
)
I know about regular expressions, specifically that $ - it's looking for the word "stubs" followed by a newline. The code here does not seem to be concerned with the decision whether or not to categorise an article; and the amendment made by Codehydro did not touch those four lines, and the word "stubs" is not found there either. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:35, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Lua doesn't have standard regular expressions, which is probably what threw you off. To be able to fit inside tiny devices (think chips on toasters, etc.), the Lua developers decided not to implement the relatively heavy regular expression syntax, but instead created their own system of Lua "patterns", which are similar to regular expressions but also differ in a few important ways. In this case, the most important distinction is that Lua strings are always multiline, so "$" means the end of the string, not the end of a line. Codehydro also makes heavy use of Lua and/or logic here - for that, see Programming in Lua, which has a better explanation than I could hope to write. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪16:12, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I would also point out that I too thought the problem involved stubs and did the same search for the word 'stubs'. Nonetheless, our thinking that category:stubs recieved special treatment was flawed and ended up sending me on a wild goose chase, since the bug was triggered by |tempsort=no rather than the category's name. Blame the person who decided {{stub}} shouldn't be categorized... or me for my botched consolidation of Asbox/templatepage, not Lua :P (Of the hundred of templates I've tested, I don't remember seeing a single stub template other than {{stub}} that sets tempsort=no) —CodeHydro19:28, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
This has now been patched. The bug came from the consolidation of Template:Asbox/templatepage (Asbox's helper template) into Module:Asbox. Basically, the helper included instructions, when |tempsort=no, not to place the category tag specified by |category= (but not category1 or category2). When the templates were separate, that instruction was ignored on articles simply because the helper was not transcluded on articles. However, the unintended consequence of consolidation is the presence of helper code without transclusion. In other words, while great care was taken to include instructions from both the main template and the helper in the consolidated module, the module was missing an instruction that was not present in either template because the instruction wasn't necessary when the templates were separate. (Yeah, I just spent hours trying to find something that was not present in the original templates -.-;) —CodeHydro21:16, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@Codehydro: Thanks for fixing it. Will the 1000+ articles which were tagged with {{stub}} while the template was broken be recategorised correctly into Category:Stubs automatically now? I see a few very recently tagged stubs have found their way into the category, but what about the previous lot? PamD22:56, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
As long as the number of stubs in the category keeps going up, without the number of uses of the tag doing the same, I wouldn't worry about it. It went up from 289 to 410, while the uses of the stub tag stayed fairly stable. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu19:15, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
I've never considered Foo-struct-stub to be a child of Foo-geo-stub; I've always seen Foo-struct-stub and Foo-geo-stub as equally-ranked children of Foo-stub. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:43, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
I think this is a dilemma. On one hand, buildings and structures are part of the geography of Earth, but that definition is impractical in many, many cases. On the other hand, buildings weren't really there in the first place, so they can be equally ranked children of subject-stub. Both definitions makes sense, but the latter definition is more convenient. I think the latter should be used. Gug01 (talk) 20:57, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
Struct-stubs have long been part of the geo-stub tree for a merely pragmatic reason - a lot of "amateur stub sorters" mark struct-stubs with a basic geo-stub tag. As such, it was more practical to have struct-stubs as part of the geo-stub hierarchy, especially in cases where there was not a separate struct-stub category for a particular country. I'd agree though that it doesn't always make sense for struct-stubs to be considered part of a region's geography, which does imply naturally occurring landforms (but then again, towns and villages are geo-stubs, which suggests otherwise). Personally, I'd take them out of the geo-stub tree, and have any upmerged national templates feeding into regional/continental struct-stub categories and general national categories (e.g., {{Fiji-struct-stub}} feeding into a ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Fiji stubs and ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Oceanian building and structure stubs) Grutness...wha?00:43, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
I can think of the following reasins for inclusion:
A building is (generally) part of a specfic location, which would be the most general definition of geography; and since we categorize parks and populated places as geography (both with permcats and with stub cats), buildings should be included
Parks are tagged as geo-stub; if they have locations for playing sport games, they also frequently have sports-venue-stub tags (a subcat of struct-stub)
Many structures are double-tagged with geo-stub tags
In the US, NRHP categories are subcats og geo-stub; many of these are buildings and structures.
I've proposed ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Metropolis of Lyon geography stubs for deletion as a way of generating discussion over at CFD although personally I'm 50:50 either way. The category was created out of process by User:Arteronyl to reflect the creation of the Metropolis of Lyon when it was carved out of Rhône département earlier this year. The general rule is that French départements have their own stub types, but MoL has a special status as a territorial collectivity. This means that it's effectively treated as a separate département but for instance it has retained its old département number which it now shares with Rhône (69). It's a real grey area - I can see arguments both ways. At present there's only one article in there. Best discussed over at CFD. Le Deluge (talk) 18:21, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
What is stub sorting?
There's been a bit of discussion on an editor's talk page about whether adding {{stub}} to an article is "stub-sorting". I don't think it is, and an edit summary of "stub-sorting" can be confusing when looking at an article's history - I've suggested that they use "stub tagging" instead. But I see that there is no definition in WP:GLOSSARY for "stub sorting".
Note: When 'PamD' asks about whether adding a stub tag to an article is considered "stub-sorting", consider the question as being general to *any* stub tag, not just to {{stub}} specifically. Personally, I've been tagging all my activity for this project as stub-sorting -- whether I'm refining the existing tags on an article, adding new tags to stub articles, or removing tags from articles that are no longer stubs. The question is whether these three activities should be labeled differently in the summary. Or does it all fall under the stub sorting umbrella? Dawynn (talk) 11:52, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
If I'm adding the article's first stub tag, I use "stub tag added". I use "moved to more specific stub template" whether I'm moving from plain {{stub}} or from something generic like {{radio-stub}} to the more specific such as {{US-radio-show-stub}}. - Dravecky (talk) 14:15, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
I too have never used "stub sorting", for me it's simply "Added stub tag", "Updated stub tag" or "Removed stub tag". Fortdj33 (talk) 15:50, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
The term is self-defining - and is widely accepted, so simply not using the term isn't going to make it go away. Simply adding a stub template to an untagged article isn't sorting a stub, it's tagging it. Stub sorting means sorting stubs (i.e., putting them in more specific stub categories, or changing existing templates to more specific ones, as in OM's example); adding a tag to an untagged article is stub tagging - simply adding {{stub}} does not sort a stub. Two different operations (but both covered by WP:WSS) Grutness...wha?01:04, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
This category has been well and truly overpopulated for too long (It had been just as big for a long time when I started my sabbatical from stub sorting about two/three years ago). I decided to have another look at it and notice that the majority of articles seem to have been turned into redirects, do we put stub tags on redirects or can we remove the tag from the redirect and therefore reduce the size of the category? My feeling is to remove them as redirects are not articles and therefore can't be stub articles, but am open to other suggestions. Waacstats (talk) 21:21, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
I agree. And this looks like the sort of task that would be better automated... there are a lot of them! I'll see whether a bot can be put onto it. It still won't solve the problem of the category, but it will reduce it significantly. Grutness...wha?00:48, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
@Erpert: As far as I know, we don't divide stub categories by year. We do subdivide by decade, and this is determined not so much by a large quantity in the main category, but when a large quantity can be identified for a given decade. What you could do is file a request at WP:WSS/P for upmerged templates for particular decades, and if approved, add these to suitable articles, replacing the existing {{Hiphop-song-stub}}. Then if you find that one of these templates has been used in 60+ articles, you can then file a request at WP:WSS/P for the decade category. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:54, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
I run into this problem a lot and when I try to find the answer, I usually end up back here on WikiProject Stub sorting.
If there are already templates created that appear to be subcategories, what is the process to add those to the tree structure of a category page?
Example: On the category page Brazilian_building_and_structure_stubs, there are only two subcategories (in the Subcategory section), but just below that (under Pages in category "Brazilian building and structure stubs") are five templates which seem to me to be subcategories. Are they not? If they are, why are they not listed in the tree structure? And, more to the point, if there are articles which are already using {{Brazil-church-stub}} etc., will they automatically be moved up into the Subcategory section once …whatever needs to happen next… happens?
As I said, I run into this a lot and am more than happy to start cleaning this up when I see it. Please tell me that these templates do not still need to be vetted by the WikiProject stub process; they are already being used, so I assume they don’t need “approval”. I am not as keen to use my time filling out bureaucratic submission forms for others' approval as I am to just change a bit of code for category pages that have just gotten a bit messy but that have the new subcategories just sitting there, waiting to be used properly. This seems like it should be a very easy fix… I hope it is! —giso6150 (talk) 16:25, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for taking the time to explain this, @Redrose64: I totally recognize the importance of this work and appreciate all the time and effort. —giso6150 (talk) 00:15, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
For info, I have tagged several of the pre-existing cats for speedy renaming, mostly to insert hyphens e.g. "Fooian Bar 17th-century birth stubs". See WP:CFDS.
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@Jeraphine Gryphon: Send them to WP:CFD (you can use the same entry for both). If they want reasons (other than creation out of process), the stub template is transcluded to only one page, and that's in userspace - stub templates need to be transcluded to at least 30 articles in mainspace. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:08, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Howdy all - I've been out of it for a while and just started re-sorting stubs per project guidelines. I came across Yanzhou (ancient China) and tried to use {{China-geo-stub}} on it. When I went to preview the edit, I saw a message above the usual "This is a ___ stub" text which read thusly: "The stub template {{China-geo-stub}} is deprecated. Please use {{PRChina-geo-stub}}, {{HongKong-geo-stub}}, {{Macau-geo-stub}}, or {{Taiwan-geo-stub}} instead."
I ended up sorting it into {{Asia-geo-stub}}, but I wonder why there doesn't seem to be a geo stub type for a region which, at the time, was not the PRC or any of those other current political entities. (I did hunt through the list of stub types, btw.) I don't necessarily want to propose such a type, but I would welcome any explanation of the rationale for the current "deprecation". Thanks! Pegship (talk) 19:45, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Is there a way to archive old proposals that were already accepted and created?
I currently see proposals from 2013-2015 and some were accepted but not created, while others were created.
This would help clean out the backlog of proposals. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:15, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
@MrLinkinPark333: I was just thinking about how to do this earlier today, heh. Yeah, it needs some sort of archiving function along the lines of AFD -- shouldn't be too hard to do it manually, but longer-term would ideal to have somebody get a bot to do it once they're all closed. I know I certainly don't have the proficiency to do that; if you don't either, perhaps we should shoot a message over to Wikipedia:Bot requests?Buttons to Push Buttons (talk | contribs) 23:16, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
@MrLinkinPark333: Yeah I got tired of how sluggish the proposals page had gotten, so got to sorting out some open months. You're right, I should have archived properly, sorry! Getting started on that now. The main issue there is that archiving had completely fallen by the wayside even before the backlog... As of the time of writing (though soon to be updated), Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/Archive redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/Archive/2010(!), and there's been none since August of that year. I can fill out some basic structure but don't really have time or energy to do the summaries as were customary on those old ones, at least for the moment. Still, it's a start, and I'll get to that now. Buttons to Push Buttons (talk | contribs) 00:33, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me why we still have this process? Looking at the current (lengthy) page, there have only been a handful of proposals over the last few months. Most of these have come from the same users who then support their own action after the set amount of days have elapsed. I've never used this page, I just go ahead and create stub templates and categories as I see fit. The current WP:CFD process now takes care of stub categories if they're not needed too, so this seems to be WP:BURO. Thanks. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead15:15, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I take it you mean the proposal process (rather than the stub sorting project as a whole). What you're seeing is those proposals not yet archived, and is therefore only a part of the total number proposed. The current CFD process is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff - this page is the fence at the top. Which is better - to say "no, this stub type runs contrary to needs for these reasons", or "good idea, but better if you tweak it to do this", or to have someone create a stub type, add the template to a couple of hundred articles, have it go through a CFD process, and then have to remove those couple of hundred templates additions? Which takes longer? Which uses up editor energy better spent on improving articles? As to just going ahead and making templates and categories, I hope you have read all that page, especially such points as "Although editors are encouraged to be bold in updating articles, more caution is sometimes required when editing pages in non-article namespaces", "One must be especially careful when being bold with templates", and "Creating new categories or reorganizing the category structure may come to affect many pages." WP:BOLD relates primarily to article edits, as is stressed throughout that page (indeed at one time "be bold" applied only to articles). Grutness...wha?23:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
There is also a second reason for proposing and getting clearance for stub templates. This project is for stub sorting. In order to sort stubs, we need to know what stub types are available to sort articles into. For that reason, we maintain a list of new stub proposals, so that stub sorters know what template tools are available to them. If people create new stub types without going through that process, how are stub sorters to know how to sort? At least many of the stub types you have created seem to be sensible ones, that don't require us to second-guess what an individual editor might have decided, but where are your new stub types listed? And what of editors who just create new stub types without reference to the naming requirements for stub templates? A lot of the time, we only notice them by chance - there's no way we can sort stubs working on the offchance that someone else hasn't created a different stub type. Without some solid attempt at codifying stub types and listing them as they are created, the whole stub sorting process becomes a shambles. Grutness...wha?23:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, to clarify, I mean the proposal process. I've not bothered to read all the pages that you mention, and have no intention to do so. This is an outdated chocolate fireguard of a process, run by a clandestine clique. "The fence at the top" comment is quite laughable. "Oh no! Someone created a template out of process!" Oh the humanity. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead08:19, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
"All the pages I mentioned" listed: WP:BOLD. And it's quite obvious you've not read it. Read it. ALL of it.
As for the ambulance at the top of the cliff, it works. Try "Oh no! Someone created a template out of process! They've added it to 275 articles. We've got editors in half a dozen wikiprojects up in arms about it, complaining that it affects their work! They'll just have to wait and fume while the deletion process goes through." Try "Why aren't you stub sorters sorting things properly? There are a whole host of templates you're not using? What do you mean you didn't know they existed?" Try "Why are these templates named differently to others? It makes trying to add stubs to an article complete guesswork when it comes to template names!"
Other than the reasons I've mentioned earlier which - rather than debating - you've simply decided to mock, the proposal process allows input from respective wikiprojects on what templates they do and don't have a use for. WP:WSS frequently acts as a liaison between different wikiprojects working in related areas - when new stub types are proposed that affect particular projects, they are frequently contacted for input on any new stub types. Far from being a "clique", we try to involve as many groups as possible in the process. Creating stub types out of process makes the creator a clique of one, and creates a lot of work for a whole host of editors across numerous wikiprojects (did you ask for input from relevant wikiprojects before making your new templates? Did you add the new templates you made to the template lists of the wikiprojects that would most likely use them? If not, why not?).
And even if you - as an experienced editor - know enough to respect these precautions, what about newbie editors? Will they know enough to follow the same procedures? If you think they would, you should see some of the stub types that have had to be deleted, especially the hundreds of useless, conflicting, and malformed types which were made before the proposal process was set up. Grutness...wha?00:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
The proposal process currently consists of User:Buttons to Push Buttons proposing something, then a few days later creating it. Why do I need to get the approval of some self-appointed busy-bodies to create anything (or wait five days for the pleasure)? There's no such vetting on categories or articles. Did I add the templates to the template lists? Of course not - what a waste of time. If it's that important, get a bot to do it. I suspect many newbies have been scared off by this Kafkaesque way of working here and simply don't bother. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead14:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure where Lugnuts is gettting the idea that WPSS is a clique. The activity among stub sorters has ebbed and flowed over the years and it may not currently be high. But the process is useful. There might be a way to automate some of the functions of stub sorting, though I'm pretty sure that if the list could be updated that way someone would have thought of it. I've been sorting since 2009 and heard discussion, tales of woe, suggestions, implementations, etc. etc. and the vast majority of it has been in good faith.
It sounds to me, Lugnuts, as though you prefer not to use the system as currently implemented, but neither do you wish to work within the system to change it. (If you truly want it to change, you should refrain from using words like "busy-bodies", "laughable", "Kafkaesque", "fence at the top", and "chocolate fireguard".) If you intend to proceed with creating templates and sorting stub srticles without the support of WPSS, why come here to pick an argument? Pegship (talk) 16:49, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
Peg, I don't have an issue with stub-sorting, it's the out-dated pointless proposal process that needs scrapping. And note the "fence at the top comment" wasn't mine - I was quoting the self-appointed chief's reply. LugnutsDick Laurent is dead09:43, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
This weird-ass desire to assign some self-serving motive to me is bizarre but hey, whatever. Wanna know why I've made use of the proposals section? Because that's what the instructions say. Now, is this process byzantine and outdated? Yeah, I would absolutely agree. It's a relic of a bygone era where Wikipedia was active enough to justify it. Go look at how many submissions we had in 2008-10: there was more than enough activity to justify a submissions process which saw ample input and had enough submissions to justify oversight. Those times have changed, and this has limited use now; I would support a proposal to drastically pare back the scope of the proposals page.
So why did I take part in it? Because I believe some level of oversight & tracking is important. Because I hadn't edited regularly in a few years, and felt neither active nor involved enough to offer an alternative. And because I didn't feel bold enough to unilaterally ignore the conventions -- for an inexperienced editor (in recent years, at least) to do that felt potentially unconstructive and disruptive. I didn't think my doing so would be in the best interests of the project. That's all. In the meantime, I posted because I didn't want to create something on just my say-so. And if there was no response, then at least there's some record of where and why I'd created something. Not clear on how the lack of other active editors in this area is my fault, though, both with regards to responses to my submissions and the lack of other submissions to put mine in perspective (seriously, 7 suggestions in the past 6 weeks is not excessive). Posting my suggestions in an open forum was how I felt my contributions to the project would be best served. Buttons to Push Buttons (talk | contribs) 03:13, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Once again, and more bluntly: what exactly do you want to happen here? You keep pointing out your dissatisfaction with the process - but then make it clear you're not going to follow it, anyway. Why not just go about your business and leave off grousing here? Pegship (talk) 22:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I have not looked at the proposals for ages. Loong time really. I guess there is not much traffic because there is not that much new stub categories anyway. We would hardly ever get this project up and running for this long without some organisation and normalisation. And I presume it needs it to keep going without suffering a noise induced heat death. "Anyone can edit" and "not a bureaucracy" does not mean to kill all and any organization nor to have no process but engaging in edit wars. - Nabla (talk) 22:39, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
IMHO, an incomplete list can be any size and may never be complete, plus the folks who are into editing lists may not overlap with those who are into stub sorting. So when I find something that's a list without other article-type content, I tend to tag it as a list and not a stub. As for {{expand}}or{{expandsection}}, to my knowledge that's to be used on sections, not necessarily the entire article. Start-Class or Stub-Class templates usually show up on talk pages and I leave 'em alone, regardless of where I find 'em - those are connected with various projects or task forces. Hope this helps, and somebody correct me if I'm wrong! Cheers, Pegship (talk) 15:39, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
G'day, not sure where to bring this up, but anyway...; the Template {{Australia-documentary-film-stub}} generates the phrase "a Australian" when placed in an article. When looking into this, I also found that {{Austria-company-stub}} generates "a Austrian"; no doubt there will be others as well. Is this something that can be fixed without too much trouble? YSSYguy (talk) 02:52, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
Hi all - I've been going through the list of "missing stub types" and fixing any templates that are misspelled or malformed. I've just finished up with {{South Africa-bio-stub}}, which redirects to {{SouthAfrica-bio-stub}}, and now that {{South Africa-bio-stub}} is no longer used on any article, what should I do with it? I can just remove the redirect code, if that's all that's necessary - it's not as though I'd be deleting a legit stub tag. Any advice? Pegship (talk) 18:03, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
@Pegship: First, don't remove the redirect code. There are several alternative things that can then be done: (i) leave it alone, it does no harm since redirs are WP:CHEAP; (ii) it was created less than a month ago, so you might be able to use {{db-redirtypo}}; (iii) take it to WP:RFD. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:52, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
Stub tag on new line
I'm sure I've read that any {{stub}} tag or specific stub tag should be separated by a blank line above it, but I can't find chapter and verse to quote - not in WP:Layout, for example. I'd like to cite that when asking at Wikipedia talk:Page Curation if they could fix the software so that when an editor adds {{uncat}} and {{stub}}, a common combination, they appear on separate lines (and ideally with a blank line between them). It would save having to add a new line or two manually every time. Any thoughts? PamD11:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
It would look cleaner, certainly. (I've been running into a lot of new stub articles where someone has put {{uncat}}{{stub}} and various other templates all on the same edit line. All the curly brackets...) Anyway, the blank line idea sounds okay, as long as we don't have to tinker with thousands of stub templates. Anyone else? Her Pegship (talk) 15:26, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
At one time, WP:FOOTERS mentioned stub templates and also that they should be preceded by two blank lines. It's certainly in this version from 18:17, 25 June 2010 - the last one to treat appendices and footers differently. It was removed 08:11, 14 January 2011 in this editbyDebresser (talk·contribs). That page has been chopped about so much in recent years that it's hard to tell what else has been lost. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:49, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
Lepidoptera stubs
Is there a preferred method for proposing a significant number of stub-templates and categories? I suspect "drowning the proposals page in them, listing them one-by-one" isn't it, right?
I'm asking because the stub-sorting on Lepidoptera and everything downstream from there is quite the mess in its current state. As of my most recent check of Category:Moth stubs and its subcats, as well as Category:Butterfly stubs and its subcats, there are dozens of categories with over 500 articles, of which over a dozen has 1000+ articles. The worst case at the moment is the end-level Category:Gelechiidae stubs, which currently holds over 5500 stubs. Even leaving aside the taxonomically contentious cases, there's a lot that can be done to partially diffuse at least the worst of such categories.
(Not blaming WikiProject Stub sorting for the mess, by the way. The state of the stub-categorization rather closely mirrors that of the 'normal' Lepidoptera categorization, which is also messy. Is what happens when a Wikiproject has around 9000-30000 times more articles than active members, I suppose, as is the case with Wikiproject Lepidoptera. (90000+ articles, maybe ten active editors per year of which at any given moment maybe 2-5 are actually active at the same time).
Welcome to stub-sorting land! If you browse through archived proposal pages, you'll see how large clumps of stub types have been proposed. There are a lot of stubs not yet created that might serve your purposes; when I get to a place where I can navigate I'll post directions. Meanwhile, thanks for your contributions. Her Pegship (talk) 23:57, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
Ah, must've overlooked those archives, will take a good look at them soon. Also, thank you! I'll admit I'm not the most familiar with the whole stub-sorting process; that is, I know how to apply the templates to articles of course, and within the Lepidoptera category I can reasonably-well figure out where stubs go (and when I can't, it's not so much because of stub-sorting issues but taxonomy issues), but the proposing/creating side of things I'm relatively inexperienced in. (The main reason I'm diving in is that I'm trying to straighten out some of the various background and maintenance related backlogs and issues on Wikiproject Lepidoptera, as it's very, very necessary. The stub-group of categories and the end-level categories+their direct parent-cat in the normal categorization tree are the easiest to fix on the side of categorization and the least likely to create yet more issues and backlogs while finished only partway, or even should they remain finished only partway, and so long as there still are hundreds of those relatively minor, fixable but frustrating/hindering issues lingering about, it's not like any effort towards the larger issues has any chance of succeeding) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 01:53, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
Dravecky (talk·contribs) died last Saturday, April 23. See his talk page for details.
He is listed as a member of this WikiProject. I will leave it up to his fellow WikiProject participants to decide when it would be appropriate to remove him from the list of active participants. His user page may be locked-down so it may require an administrator to remove him from the relevant wikiproject-participation-category. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:25, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
Stub types list section & lag
The Invertebrates part of the Science section of the stub-types list is growing unwieldy. The primary issue is the Insects group of stubs, of which especially the moths group is not. helping., but butterflies, beetles and some other insects play a role as well.
The page lags something fierce on editing, even if just the invertebrates section (at least for me, but I'm on a fairly good though not top-of-the-line pc, so I'm probably not the only one) and we're reaching the point where some of the entries have ********** in front of them. That's ten bullets, for those not inclined to count 'm.
Would it perhaps be possible to move the Insects part of the Invertebrates section of Science to its own page and then transclude it onto the list, or can someone think of a different solution? AddWittyNameHere (talk) 18:50, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
What are your thoughts on using the Category:1960s singles and similar decade categories as the basis for moving stubs from {{1960s-song-stub}}to{{1960s-single-stub}}? i.e. If an article is in the Category:1960s singles tree and has {{1960s-song-stub}} on the page, it would be swapped over to {{1960s-single-stub}}. I recently used this to populate Category:1950s singles, which was undersized, but it seems to make sense to more broadly use this to refine stub categorization of songs. I ran some pre-parsing using WP:AWB and an automated task to do this would result in edits to 1,612 articles. All the singles stub categories are sub-categories of the songs stub categories, of course. Yea/nay? ~ Rob13Talk02:34, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
I've always given up trying to sort songs/singles stubs because while I understand that a single means something released as a single song from an album...to me it's still a song. I applaud any efforts you make, as long as the categories assigned to an article are appropriate. Her Pegship (talk) 04:52, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
The advantage of using the existing categorization to assign these stub categories is that, without checking the facts of each article, I can guarantee that each categorization will be no more incorrect than the existing categorization. I can't guarantee that there aren't songs in Category:1961 singles which don't belong there any more than I can guarantee someone didn't categorize New YorkinCategory:Green Bay Packers players when I run a WikiProject tagging run, but this at least achieves consistency in our categorization. If there's an error, at least it wasn't introduced by such an automated run; it was an error in the existing categorization. Having said that, I spot-checked Category:1950s singles before giving it a similar treatment with semi-automation and found no instances where the songs weren't actually singles. ~ Rob13Talk05:37, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
Automatic stub sorting (kind of)
Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BU RoBOT 25, which is a proposed bot task that would make it easy to populate stub categories based on existing categorization schemes. See the songs/singles category above here for an example where this has already been put to good use. Any comments at the BRFA are greatly appreciated. ~ Rob13Talk23:34, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Hi all - the recent kerfuffle over the TfD/CfD for {{Nelson-geo-stub}} and its category has highlighted a problem we often have at WPSS - keeping track of deletion nominations for stub types on those process pages. The XfD watcher who was most heavily involved in the discussions - User:BU Rob13 - has suggested something we should have probably done ages ago - getting WP:AALERTS messages posted here whenever such a discussion comes up. BU Rob13 has kindly offered to run a bot to tag all stub templates and categories that are in ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stub categories and ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stub message templates. All that's needed is agreement here that this would be a good idea. Please add a yay or nay comment below... cheers, Grutness...wha?01:49, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
yay. I watchlist the Portugal related alerts. It works. Not sure if we would have high traffic for stubs and if that would still work fine (Portugal articles only have a couple nomination a week) - Nabla (talk) 22:26, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
@Nabla: As a regular closer at TfD and CfD, I can say that nominations of stub templates and categories are exceedingly rare. The stub articles themselves wouldn't be tagged. ~ Rob13Talk15:18, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
@BU Rob13: Right. I close a few TfDs once in a while and I do not recall the last time I saw a stub template there. So much so that I forgot that I *might* have seen one :-) - Nabla (talk) 19:49, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
True - after the problems with the Nelson template I had a quick look through all other open discussions and only found one other stub category up for discussion. Grutness...wha?02:15, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
@Grutness: Do you want to handle the actual enrollment in AALERTS or would you like me to? I've never done it before, but I think it's meant to be easy to stumble through. We may have to enable categorization on Template:WikiProject Stub sorting in order to use AALERTS. I can take care of that piece if it's necessary. ~ Rob13Talk23:32, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
I think you know more about the process than I do, so if you don't mind it's probably best if you handle it! Thanks Grutness...wha?01:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
You an find the AALERTS here. Still waiting on approval for the bot task to do the actual tagging, so it's not functional yet, but you can throw it on your watchlist so that it'll work when things are functioning. ~ Rob13Talk13:59, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
That won't cover everything we need, so I think tagging is the better solution here. There's also awareness advantages to tagging; editors who aren't familiar with this WikiProject (including myself until recently) can realize it exists via the template. The bot task has been approved, so I'll go ahead with that tonight. ~ Rob13Talk13:04, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
Would creating an actual WikiProject template be a better approach? The project would basically be only project, template and category classes so there can be more variety in those classes since it's not really touching more of mainspace. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:18, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
We already have that at {{WikiProject Stub sorting}}. Redrose was arguing that using the existing categories would be better, but that doesn't seem to work given the limits of a single category and no subcategories being tracked. I'm approved for a bot task to tag all the talk pages, so I'll go ahead with that when I have a chance. Going to happy hour tonight and I don't edit/run a bot while drinking, so it'll probably be tomorrow. ~ Rob13Talk20:21, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
The AALERTS is beginning to work at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Article alerts. Please note that tagging is still ongoing and likely to take until Thursday or Friday given the large number of edits, so not everything will appear there yet. I can tag again in the future if needed, but there shouldn't be a need; please tag new stub categories/templates as they're created instead. ~ Rob13Talk08:23, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
Project stubs vs. sorted stubs
This is kind of a headache, but I assume someone must have discussed this before. What's the deal with project stubs vs. sorted stubs? I'm currently running AWB through Category:Stub-Class Australian rules football articles to get a sense of how many of the 13,174 stubs in that category don't have any sort of stub template on the actual article page. It's not painting a great picture so far. The pre-parsing is around half done and over 75% aren't in stub categories on the actual article page. ~ Rob13Talk22:45, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
It seems the "Stub-Class" talk page banners are for the benefit/use of specific projects (such as the History Project), whose definition of "stub" is evaluated within the context of their own subject area. I don't feel strongly about bringing the Stub-Class articles in line with WPSS types; I've been ignoring the talk page templates for 8 years now without a qualm. XD Her Pegship (talk) 02:06, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
Out of the 13,174 "stubs" based on that talk page category, around 4,500 of them are not tagged with stub templates and contain less than 1,500 total characters (including everything in the source code, even infoboxes, navboxes, etc). Those should unambiguously be tagged with stub templates, I think. I'll go to WP:WikiProject Australian rules football about it, but I do wonder whether other projects have similar stats. ~ Rob13Talk02:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
Stub-class, in the context of a WikiProject banner, is just one level on a whole spectrum. The vast majority of WikiProjects respect the scale at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Grades, although a small number of WikiProjects (such as Military History) have custom criteria for some levels. The reason that many WikiProjects have their own pages for assessment criteria is partly to accommodate the custom scales (the most common customisation being the omission of A-class), but mainly so that examples specific to that WikiProject may be given in the last column. Although rows may be added or omitted, the columns (other than the last one) for any given row should be the same for all WikiProjects. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:58, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
This seems more like an issue of a lack of tagging with the project at all rather than somehow mis-tagging items. These are different mechanisms and so there's a discrepancy there. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 10:25, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
This has been discussed frequently in the past. Stub-Class articles are not really connected with stubs in any way at all. In many cases, an article can be regarded as Stub-Class by a WikiProject while no longer being a stub, and vice versa, depending on a project's own definitions. Given that stubs are intended to work across the entirety of Wikipedia independent of individual subject projects, we have different guidelines for what is and isn't a stub to those used by the individual projects. Although 600,000 seems pretty high and some stubbing might be necessary, it's not too much of a surprise that there are some articles which are Stub-Class but not stubs. Similarly, there are probably quite a large number of stubs which are Start-Class. Grutness...wha?01:10, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, would the stub sorting project have any objection to automatically adding stub templates to articles which are both Stub-Class and less than 1,500 characters in total prose? That would include even the source code for infoboxes, etc., so those are unambiguously actual stubs. This would be something I'd talk to individual projects about to see if they're interested in this in their content areas, but I don't want to start conversations about this if the stub sorters would object. ~ Rob13Talk01:28, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
WP Highways, WP Catholicism, WP India, WP Alternative music... In any case, given that the definition of Stub-Class at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Grades is different to the definition of a stub as used elsewhere in Wikipedia (such as at WPSS), the discrepancy is still there. The definition of Stub-Class is very loose, though workable; that used for stubs in general is a bit more strict (for example, an article with one sentence of text and a large infobox might be considered Start-Class, inasmuch as it "Provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more". It would still, however, be a stub, as it only has one line of text). This is why Stub-Class and stub are different things and have different, though similar, names (ISTR when the assignment classes were inaugurated, several of us at WPSS asked unsuccessfully for the name of the smallest class to be changed, realising that just this sort of confusion would occur). Grutness...wha?13:42, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
Do we want to add the big-bold-notice as an WP:Editnotice?
Pegship copied the notice that is at the top of this page (right above the first comment) to the bottom of the page a few months ago.[1]
Unfortunately, the use of "Add topic" or "+" (depending on your settings) "breaks" the intent of his edit, so I removed it.[2]
If too many people are ignoring the existing notice near the top of this page, we can ask an administrator to create an "Edit notice" that will appear any time a user edits this page.
Is there a big enough problem to warrant doing this?
For reference, here is a copy of the text that is at the top of the page:
copy of big notice that is at the top of the page
NOTE: This page is not a forum to suggest the creation of articles. If you wish to create an article on any subject, go to Wikipedia:Articles for creation and follow the instructions there.
Responding to my own question: Personally, I don't care one way or the other, except that having editnotices without at least some real need is probably a bad idea. So, is there a need? How often do people use this page as a forum to suggest articles? If it's less than a handful per year, then I would say it's "clearly not needed." if it's more than a handful of times a month, then I would say it is "clearly needed." Anything in between is in that grey zone of "maybe, maybe not." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 02:15, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
I reverted an image change on the videogame-stub and inc-vg templates because it appears it was done for the purpose of advertising the video game Wikiproject. KATMAKROFAN (talk) 15:18, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Sound familiar? This stub type and category have been re-created in spite of consensus to delete back in May. It was not proposed or discussed here at WPSS (or anywhere?), it's incorrectly formed, and the dispute over its necessity is documented in the May discussion. There's also a -geo-stub sub-cat, which I've also nominated. This might have been done in good faith, but it's still unnecessary and incorrect. Please feel free to weigh in. Her Pegship (talk) 15:08, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
@Pegship and Pegship: dear users like other countries Nagorno-Karabakh_Republic must be has it own categories and template like other nations even there not completely recognized by all nations they have it ownsModern Sciences (talk) 20:06, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
@Modern Sciences:: If you read over the statements made by RedRose64 and myself, you will see that neither of us is discussing the political status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, nor are we making any comment regarding encyclopedic categories or articles pertaining thereto. There are, however, protocols regarding the creation of STUB templates and STUB categories, which you have disregarded. A stub template may be proposed and created through due processatWikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting, and once the template has been applied to 60 or more articles, a stub category may be created also, once again providing there is consensus at the stub sorting project. If you persist in re-creating stub templates and stub categories out of process, they will be repeatedly listed for deletion. (Please note that I'm not even addressing the naming conventions for stub templates, which these do not meet.) Her Pegship (talk) 20:21, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
Another out of process - DominicanRepublic-tennis-bio-stub
Hello all,
I have made a userbox that will help us sort stubs better. This userbox will keep track of all the stubs in the stubs category, and will change the color of the number at 400, 600, and 900 articles in the category.
Does anyone here have any pointers to the number of stubs associated with the USA, Canada, and the (geographic) British Isles (i.e. UK + IE). Pointers to the difficulty I have in answering this question are at User talk:Tagishsimon#Stubs. Input here or on my talk page would be much appreciated; thanks. --Tagishsimon(talk)05:18, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Question
Is there a reason why some U.S. states have bio stubs and others don't? My assumption is that there just aren't enough in some states, but I assume at some point there will be enough for all the states and I think it would help with uniformity of things. South Nashua (talk) 21:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the alert. I've recently created several upmerged templates in hopes that editors who sort but don't create will then use the templates, which is not always the case. Is there a way to generate a report of just unused stub templates? We could then alert the appropriate WikiProjects and/or list the templates on the WPSS To do page. Her Pegship (talk) 18:57, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
@Her Pegship: Yes, there is, but sadly the last update was July 2016. Database reports are still kind of a mess. See Wikipedia:Database_reports/Unused_stub_templates, for what it's worth. I'm not blindly nominating all unused stub templates, just the ones I think unlikely of being used. It's a wonder why anyone ever thought {{1910s-erotic-novel-stub}} was a good idea, for instance, especially given that we have only 87 total erotic novel stubs. I've withdrawn the jazz composition nominations; I had believed it unlikely that we have many stubs in those intersections, but perhaps I was incorrect. I had assumed the lack of transclusions supported that belief. ~ Rob13Talk19:09, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
A number of stub templates and categories relating to Punjab have been created by Peeta Singh (talk·contribs), and I can't find the discussion(s) that authorised them.
I suspect that there were no discussions, as all these templates are underutilised (many have no transclusions at all), and the categories underpopulated (many contain only the stub template itself). --Redrose64 (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
I redirected the one film template to the proper format and updated the categories, but now that the creator of these has been banned, I think they all need to be nominated for deletion. Fortdj33 (talk) 04:08, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Nope, they were not discussed, though at least the creator was tidy about it. As far as I know, the existing stub types that fall in the Punjab region are sufficient for WPSS purposes. Is there anyone experienced at mass nominations who wants to take this on? Her Pegship (talk) 05:48, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Delete all of them. I don't see a clear need for all these right now. And Punjab seems to be a state in India and Pakistan. I am not aware of classifying bios by state names (except for politicians). Other states such as Category:Tamil Nadu stubs don't seem to have so many stub templates anyway. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 10:36, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest the majority (if not all) of these templates and cats be nominated for deletion as {{Db-c1}} (categories empty for 7 days) with a note that they were not proposed or discussed by the stub project (or indeed by anyone other than User:Peeta Singh). Any other ideas? Her Pegship (talk) 00:42, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
Quite a few aren't eligible for C1 as they contain the stub template, you'd want to nuke them first before the category was "empty". And the templates are of course part of the cleanup process.Le Deluge (talk) 01:03, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
In true chicken/egg fashion, there is a template ({{Db-templatecat}}) for "categories populated by deleted or retargeted templates"; still, the Templates_for_discussion page says "Stub templates and categories should be listed at Categories for discussion, as these templates are merely containers for their categories, unless the stub template does not come with a category and is being nominated by itself." Sooo...where should we begin? Her Pegship (talk) 03:38, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
Ha, "templates are merely containers" is not exactly the way to word it but I'd say it's pretty clear, take them to CfD.Le Deluge (talk) 12:32, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
I've used the db-templatecat tag on all the categories; have no idea whether or how to tag the templates themselves. Presumably those doing the deletion will know what to do? Her Pegship (talk) 01:57, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for the cleanup, As I was discussing at Bishonen talk page about all this unnecessary stuff created by Peeta Singh so do we need to go for a cleanup with WikiProject and Portal as well? GSS (talk|c|em) 06:06, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
Hi folks! Would anyone mind if I suggest using the Discoveries page for any new discoveries? It's been dormant since 2012, possibly due to little use, but I think it's a more appropriate place for these discussions (and easier to find). Cheers, Her Pegship (talk) 17:43, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
@Margaretver: If it's a category page that you created yourself, it may meet WP:CSD#G7: so first ensure that there are no pages in the category, then add {{db-author}} to it and save. An admin will delete it within a few hours. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:17, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
Hi there, and welcome to stub-land! I see that you've created a project relevant to this category, so I appreciate your efforts. That said, we should be able to rearrange the stub type to everyone's satisfaction, but in future, please propose stub types on the Proposals page.
It still does that on the Android. On the laptop, which I'm using, it takes me to the page you said it would. Evidently this is a bug in the mobile interface.
In any case, my advice still holds: We should, MUST, use consistent spelling, spacing, and capitalization for everything relating to that Nigerian state. --Thnidu (talk) 07:35, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
"Note also that as stub templates are for maintenance purposes, not user browsing (see #Wikipedia administrative categories above), they do not count as categorization for the purposes of Wikipedia's categorization policies. An article which has a "stubs" category on it must still be filed in the most appropriate content categories, even if one of them is a direct parent of the stubs category in question."
I noticed there are many articles which have the topic-stub category but not the parent category of said stub-category set. Hence I suggest that a script or bot may be written that goes through all the articles in Category:Stub categories and sets their respective parent category.
Note that once the stub-template is removed its category will be removed as well. I don't think we can ensure that the parent category is added when the template is removed by some editor so this is why I think we should get this working.
Oppose. It sounds efficient on the face of it, but as someone who patrols the ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stubs, I frequently find articles where there's a "permcat" that applies, but not a stub category, so the article gets assigned a less specific (usually) stub template in addition to its permcats. The above process would only add the less specific permcat - which would make the permcat bloated, even if the more specific permcats were assigned as well. I hope I'm making sense. Her Pegship (talk) 00:49, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
@Fadesga: Thank you, that's a very clear explanation. Now, for the benefit of other editors, will you please add it to the template documentation? I tried, but I could not access it. --Thnidu (talk) 03:56, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
@Thnidu: Excuse me, dear fellow editor. Could you be so kind and give me an example of what you are asking me to do? Let's compare with another already existing template documentation (maybe I am not experienced enough on that feature). Regards, --Fadesga (talk) 12:09, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Let's see if I understood. Take the template {{book-stub}}, it has an explanation included "Please avoid using this stub note. Instead, please sort this as either a {{novel-stub}} or a {{nonfiction-book-stub}}". Are you asking me to do something similar? Or do you mean another thing? --Fadesga (talk) 12:12, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
The documentation for stub templates is not easily customisable; it is standard text that is intentionally similar for all stub templates. Part of it (everything down to and including the heading "General information") is generated by Module:Asbox; the rest (everything after, but not including, the heading "General information") is taken from Template:Stub documentation. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:46, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
@Fadesga and Redrose64: Thank you, more-experienced fellow editors, for your patience with my ignorant requests. I can use fairly simple templates and create simple ones, but I have no idea of the mechanics of building complex ones, including embedded templates.
Fadesga, I am indeed asking for something similar to the {{book-stub}} advisory. Your answer
This template {{translation-stub}} is meant to be used on an article ABOUT translation as topic. For translators, use {{translator-stub}} or the related templates.
is exactly the kind of explanation I was asking for. Now I know, but what of the next editor, at my level of knowledge or below, who wants to tag as stub an overly-brief article about translat*? {{translation-stub}} doesn't tell them (us) what it's to be used for-- nor, I suppose, does {{translator-stub}}. It may be clear to experienced stub editors and sorters, but not to the newcomer to this territory. That is why I asked you to incorporate that explanation into the doc, and maybe your third sentence as well, the one about maintenance templates related to translation.
Redrose64, are most or all stub templates so devoid of basic information as the distinctions I asked about in my original posting, above?
--Thnidu (talk) 06:47, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
Mwa, the Frisia one could have good use if rather than its current use of 'geography of Frisia' (which is sufficiently covered by the appropriate German and Dutch geography subcats), it were to be used for stubs about either historical Frisia or Frisia in the broadest meaning. By keeping it solely to Geography, there is little point in it, as the category is unlikely to find more than a handful articles that aren't better off in the already-existing structure. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 01:06, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
Trouble with that is always keeping people away from the geography, unless you rename it frisia-history or something? The obvious question is how do we handle the other fragments of the historical Low Countries, do we separate them or just lump them in to the modern country histories? The Evansville template is currently not being used - population is 120k so pretty marginal in any case for its own stub type? Le Deluge (talk) 09:33, 16 September 2016 (UTC)
I would like to create the interior designers stub category and then discuss the newly created category with active editors in the Wikipedia architecture category. I'd also like to use this new stub category for the the creation of articles on notable living interior designers. I have made four so far, one of which is awaiting verification. And one I have not yet uploaded. They are Liang Zhi TianJohn SaladinoJuan Montoya. There's also a few up already created by others and I'd like a way to group them and see that they get due attention. I'm raising this on the talk page prior to editing the article space of this page, as this is the first time I have attempted to go through this process. Many thanks. Edaham (talk) 15:43, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I see! I went through the required reading. At the moment, the creation of the content is more important than having a special category to which I can add it, so I'll keep the idea in mind for now. Thanks for your reply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edaham (talk • contribs) 22:31, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
I'm not convinced about it, to be honest. While on the surface it sounds a good idea it may be more complicated than it initially seems. Those categories you mention are run by individual WikiProjects for their projects' use, and aren't really anything to do with WP:WSS. Creating a separate hierarchy of template categories will just get confused with those WP-specific categories (and WP:WSS is already too often accused of interfering with/getting in the way of subject-specific WikiProjects). We already have stub templates within the individual stub categories anyway, so if anyone is looking for specific template types, it's easy enough to check that way. Grutness...wha?15:08, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
template:Alien-stub is wrong. It claims to be an "extrateressials" stub category, but it uses the Science fiction stubs category. Since extraterrestrials are not necessarily science fiction, this categorization is wrong, or the description is wrong. It even claims it is called {{Alien-sf-stub}} which isn't the name of the template (it is a different template)
-- 65.94.169.56 (talk) 13:41, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
This stub template was deleted in 2014. It seems to have been revived in a confused form without any discussion earlier this year. The only article marked with it wasn't a stub, by the way, so it is currently unused and can presumably be speedied as the re-creation of a deleted template. Grutness...wha?15:21, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Arkansas National Register of Historic Places - Help with Regions
(Edit: Please disregard this message, this was the result of a typo that I have fixed) Hi, I'm working on the June 2017 proposal to add more subcategories to Arkansas Registered Historic Place stubs, and I'm running into a problem. Because many of the counties don't merit their own stub category, I decided it made the most sense to implement region subcategories, and then add all the counties categories to their respective region. Ultimately, larger regions would get their own category within the region, while smaller categories would rollup directly to the region.
The problem I have is that I'm not sure how to get the smaller counties to rollup directly to the region without their own category. I used {{asbox}} to try and create {{BooneCountyAR-NRHP-stub}} but first of all the template page does not look like a correct asbox page, and pages tagged with this template do not appear on the Northwest Arkansas NRHP stubs page. I've tried looking at various other examples of NRHP stub categories with these sorts of regional/county subdivisions such as New York, Oregon, and Maryland, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Could somebody please help me out by creating a couple of the missing county templates in Northwest Arkansas to give me an example to work from for the remaining counties? Fixing {{BooneCountyAR-NRHP-Stubs}} and creating {{CarrollCountyAR-NRHP-Stubs}} would be fine. Furicorn (talk) 00:49, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Stub template as children of multiple parent stub categories
I was wondering if it is bad form to add an upmerged stub template to multiple stub categories? I was thinking {{SouthCarolina-plantation-stub}} might be worth adding an additional rollup specifically relating it to slavery, as the current parent is mostly about architecture. But reading through the guidelines, it was ambiguous what guidelines to use when deciding whether to add a stub to multiple stub parents. -Furicorn (talk) 21:22, 28 August 2017 (UTC|
I didn't realize upmerged templates needed to be proposed since they don't create new categories, I thought just new categories did. I will propose it now, but my question still stands about multiple categories on a single stub template -Furicorn (talk) 00:05, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
First establish the need for the broader group, then determine if there is a need for a subdivision of the broad group; don't do it backwards. At each stage, create the template first, and only create the category once you can put 60+ pages into it (again, don't do it backwards). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:14, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
I don't care what structure gets used, I made a proposal because I was interpreting the response from Od Mishehu (talk·contribs) to mean that I should make a proposal about category hierarchy, so then I proposed stub categories that match the existing ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Plantations hierarchy based on that misinterpretation. I did not know (and honestly am still unclear) if upmerged templates that do not create new categories can be made without a proposal. But, I am trying to act in good faith. -Furicorn (talk) 09:20, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
A series of by-state plantation-stub templates might be useful, but I'd hold off on categories until we're sure of numbers. Upmerging them to the by-state building and structure stub categories seems a sensible way forward. But yes, in future please propose them first! Grutness...wha?00:05, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, that was it. I needed to update the link tables for the article that didn't appear in the new category by saving the article without any edits. I had misunderstood that and thought I had to make a null edit to the category. Thanks for your help. Mduvekot (talk) 20:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
It's probably easier to use AutoWikiBrowser than to start to develop your own - use this page as a sample for how to do a per-state search (both for proposing and for doing), and to do the sorting you can go to the output tab and set it for "Wiki" to generate a page you can put on your own subpage. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu07:22, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
I'm trying to think of a good structure to subdivide Category:Spilomelinae stubs into more manageable groups of around 200, but the best I could think of was alphabetical categories by genus . Do people have any better ideas?
Some of the categories on the report look legit, such as ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Stubs. Would you mind describing what "dubious" means in this context? Thanks! ~Her Pegship~ 19:30, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
Stub templates that use Template:Soccer icon (from helper template Template:Soccer icon2) result in big white squares instead of having transparent backgrounds. If you have a different color set as background color instead of white, then this is very noticeable. Other stub templates (like flagmap stub images, etc) have transparent backgrounds.
Hi,
I have removed the stub tag from a number of articles that I expanded over the past few months. These articles are mostly bios of academics, artists and 19th century musicians. I followed the instructions at WP:DESTUB, however, I am not sure about how to handle the stub tag on the article's talk page. On the talk page, the article appears to be rated as stub→start→etc. But I think that only administrators can classify articles beyond stub class. I have stopped removing stubs - because of the obvious conflict between the status on the article itself and the talk page. I am reluctant to proceed any further. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. BronHiggs (talk) 08:09, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
@BronHiggs: There should be no stub tags on talk pages. If you mean the WikiProject article quality grading scheme, setting these is not an admin task - anybody may assess an article up to and including B-class without consulting anybody else. The criteria for B-class are fairly rigid, see WP:BCLASS, but below that there is considerable leeway. Above B-class, the GA, A and FA ratings all require discussion with at least one other person besides compliance with strict criteria - see WP:WIAGA, WP:ACLASS and WP:WIAFA. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:37, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
Section edit links missing?
Is anyone else not seeing [edit] links for each section on Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals? I've navigated to several other pages, including the sub-pages for each month, and I can see the section edit links everywhere except the Proposals page. Any advice on how I can get them back? Am I just now noticing something that's always existed?? Pegship (talk) 20:03, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes, they're missing. This usually means that there is bad Wikimarkup somewhere, such as an improperly-closed template {{foo)) and it may well be in a subpage. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:09, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
Using that info, I compared December 2017 with February 2018 (because that one also has several closed discussions) in order to see what the main differences were - and found this edit to add {{archive}}. This sets __NOEDITSECTION__, which kills the section edit links because it's not expecting to be used on pages with ongoing discussions. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:48, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
Large number of out-of-process (mostly taxonomic) stub category/template creations by blocked sock Caftaric.
And by "large number" I mean "130+". Unfortunately, the entirety of them will need to be checked. Some of them are valid enough other than not being listed on the stub types list. Some would be fine as an upmerged template but have too few articles at the moment to be valid as stand-alone category; some have too few articles to be useful even as upmerged template. Another common theme is adding layers for the sake of adding layers, something they're notorious for even outside stub sorting.
See for example the tree down from ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Diptera stubs. Yes, a containing/diffusing category can be useful, but layers upon layers of them for higher taxon ranks that shave off a very small number at a time while sorting the rest of the contents further down and down and down isn't useful. (And that it frequently mirrors the main category structure means zilch, considering Caftaric was highly active there as well) Even most of the few higher-ranked layers that seem useful due to number of articles in it aren't: that's just a lack of properly sorting the rest of them down. Which is another big Caftaric issue: creating layers both upward and downward and not bothering to actually sort the majority of relevant contents to their proper places. Or sorting them by diffusing the wrong category, sometimes. *sigh*
In regards to seems-useful-is-actually-full-of-not-properly-downsorted-stubs: Thinking of e.g. ‹The templateCategory link is being considered for merging.›Category:Asilomorpha stubs here. With 194 pages it would seem valid, but other than the template and the article Asilomorpha, pretty much everything can be sorted into the superfamily subcats, which are also Caftaric-creations, but actually useful.
I've been building a table for a while to summarize the issues or absence thereof of each of their categories, but I can't seem to find the time or energy to wrap it up, so I'm posting this here in advance. AddWittyNameHere19:29, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
Stub template question
There are some users who edit insect, arachnid, and arthropod articles, and replace the "official" stub category template with a new one that is not in the official list, usually with a slightly lower taxonomic rank.
I asked the operator why and they said per Wikidata Rules all categories are eligible for Wikidata connection. It just seemed a little weird to me since I've never seen one of my stub categories added to Wikidata before. -Furicorn (talk) 16:42, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
There's no reason to be alarmed, certainly. It's routine for all kinds of pages to be added to Wikidata, generally, besides those which are disallowed explicitly by d:WD:N. Sometimes a bot is needed for that process. You can turn notifications off for Wikidata connection if you would like, but I would guess this is mostly a one-time thing. --Izno (talk) 20:08, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
At one time, Wikidata had only one purpose: to replace the former interlanguage links system. Basically, if you have a page on English Wikipedia, and a page on another Wikipedia (such as French) that covers the same topic (but in the other language of course), you create a Wikidata entry (one of their pages beginning Q) and add two links to that: one pointing to the English article, and one to the French one. As a result, both of those articles gain a little box in the left sidebar titled "Languages", under which there is a link to the same article in the other language. For several years, that was all that Wikidata did. Later on, other features were added, some clearly useful. These features include being a central place to store the latitude and longitude of a place or fixed object, so that these don't need to be entered individually on the various Wikipedias. It also provides the ability to show the relationship between a category and its "main article", or the relationship between a category on Commons and its matching article on Wikipedia). It's very complicated now. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:30, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone focus on sorting Category:People stubs? I've just suggested to an editor that adding {{bio-stub}} was less than helpful as {{stub}} would bring it to the eyes of a stub-sorter, but s/he then reasonably and, I find, rightly, queried my assumption that no-one was sorting Category:People stubs. Looking at it, I'm delighted to see that there are only 6 in that broad category, so I guess someone must indeed be keeping an eye on them: good news, and well done whoever's working there.
I see we've got 1,411 in Category:British people stubs (more than the 559 in Category:American people stubs). The British ones start with initial F, suggesting that some good person is systematically sorting them: well done that stub-sorter! I'll try to chip in with some work on that category.
So this ends up by being just a heads-up to stub-sorters that even when Category:Stubs is empty there are a lot of nationality-bio-stubs which could usefully be sorted into more specific stub types: some of our colleagues are already concentrating there but there's plenty more to be done. Happy Stub-sorting! (@Philafrenzy: for info) PamD08:58, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
Actors should have a stub type, there are a lot of them and it should be possible to make a basic article about and actor and mark it for more detail. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DemonDays64 (talk • contribs) 02:41, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
I've been working with User:Danski454 on the script, and i found out that Category:Chinese Roman Catholic diocese stubs was not turning up in the search because it was not added to the stub type category tree (this category may have been created outside the stub template process, it doesn't have a WP:Stub template, and once I tag all the diocese, it may be too small to legitimately exist). I was wondering if there is any patrol or tracking method for monitoring new stub categories that have not been appropriately added to the stub types tree? -Furicorn (talk) 18:57, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
While going through stubs to sort, I came across AMD Platform Security Processor. I didn't think it was a stub, and would have manually removed the stub template, but I was inspired to write a script to do it for me. The result: De-Stub.js, a script to remove stub templates from pages. I thought the people involved in this wikiproject might be interested in trying it out. Let me know if you have any questions. --DannyS712 (talk) 09:25, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
@DannyS712: thank you! I gave it a shot, but I was not able to get this to work on Robert Brunham - this page is still a stub, but I just wanted to test it here. A separate point is that it would be better if it could somehow integrate into this script from user Danski454. Most of the work in this project is multi-step - if we are removing stub templates, it's usually to apply more specific stub template(s), so unfortunately this is a bit limited in terms of most of the work that goes on here. But thanks for sharing your work. -Furicorn (talk) 23:25, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
@Mitchumch: I'm not sure what the correct format would be, but I do know that stub templates should not contain spaces. Also, if renamed, I suggest it be tweaked to clearly indicate it concerns the U.S. civil rights movement. Her Pegship(speak)17:13, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
If the category exists (it's a blue link in the template), a WP:NULLEDIT to the template will fix this.
Typo in category name
Either amend the template's category parameter to match the actual name of the category, or move the category page to match the name used by the template's category parameter
The |category= parameter looks correct, but actually contains an invisible character (usually a left-to-right mark) immediately after the category name
Edit the stub template. Position the mouse some distance to the right of the value of the |category= param, click the mouse. Then press the ← Backspace key sufficient times to remove the last letter. Then retype the letter. Do this also for |category1= and |category2= if present, then save.
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.